Star find of the day goes to Alan for this fine piece of furnace lining complete with fired on vitrified slag:
Unfortunately the furnace has slumped a bit over the last 2,000 or so years and isn't in the original position, so is unsuitable for archaeomagnetic dating, but it's still looking good:
In fact the whole site is looking good, it's just a shame we're going to have to start backfilling it in the next few days, don't know where the time's gone this year. We have started filling in some peripheral areas already, with some of our endless supply of big rocks, and we've got the first 1,000 sandbags filled now.
Julie is still racing round trying to get everything recorded before we close up, and it's not always easy getting just the perfect view of all the phasing when there's lots of walls & subdivisions going on, sometimes it only makes sense from directly above:
Steve & Julie had a surprise visitor today, an old friend Sarah who was one of the diggers at the Brough of Birsay excavation in the late 70s/early 80s, and who hadn't been back to Orkney since then. Bless her little cotton socks, her first words to me were 'I love the dig diary - but where's Star?' which gave me the perfect excuse to take a photo of them together:
We also had another quern stone turn up today, embedded in a flagged surface, it needs further excavation before it will look its best but it's a solid enough chunk:
And finally, you may remember that Hannah Roe from BBC Radio Orkney came out to visit us a few weeks back, as well as the radio piece she filmed us too, and her piece is now live on the BBC website, featuring interviews with Steve, Julia and Talia our finds supremo, together with several a starring performance by a certain greyhound of our acquaintance. She's worried that she'll now be mobbed by her fans everywhere she goes, so she's been practising her disguises just in case:
